I need your thoughts on ESXi business continuity

[IT_Architect]

Currently we use ShadowProtect, which works with Oracle's virtual box to do that and it works great, especially for physical machines.  However, I'm looking for something that works with VMware so snapshots can be saved to another location, and that location brought up to a certain point in time if there is a failure or malware, under VMware.  Then they can fire up the other machine to a point of 15 minutes ago or 4 hours ago and continue from there.  With ShadowProtect, if the backups have been altered, it will not replicate them.  The end game is to have a standby environment that cannot be corrupted.  The backups move one way to the backup environment, and are not accepted if they have been altered.  We will then replicate off-site in the local area, which we provide as a service now.

Thanks!

[ITaaP · Accepted solution]

There are a lot of different ways to approach this depending on your budget and infrastructure. I use SAN to SAN replication, Veeam, and Zerto depending on the use case. SAN to SAN works great for BC and you can use another product for backups. Zerto does support backups, but I have never used it for that. Veeam is very versatile as you can utilize replication or backup copy jobs. I use that a lot in mixed environments where there are VMs and physical servers. Keep a copy of the backups onsite, and also copy them offsite. Pricing is very good if you go through a service provider rather than buying perpetual licenses.

[sjesse]

You could try vpshere replicaiton and replicate the virtual machine to a different locaiton. One of the features is point in time snapshots. I've never used that feature but it sounds like it might be something look look at.

vSphere Replication Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - The current version of this doc has moved to:...

[IT_Architect]

ITaaP​:

They both sound very good.  I will need to do some more digging into them

Thanks!

[IT_Architect]

sjesse​  We actually do something similar to that now with web VMs using GhettoVCB, but those VMs are a lot smaller of course.  We have a VM on each host that provides an NFS target and they cross-backup to each other each night.  When there is a problem, we simply start the VM on the backup server.  However, factories have too much data for that.